Scott Kelby Checks the D3
Scott Kelby got his hands on a D3:
Although I didn’t get a chance to shoot with the Nikon D3 during the morning shoot, I spent hours with it tonight at our dusk shoot, and I have to say; not only does it live up to it’s hype, I’d have to say it actually exceeds it. There are a lot of things to love about the D3, but the lack of noise is far beyond what I had ever imagined (and I had heard stories of people raving about the low noise, but you’ve really got to see it in person to believe it).
I haven’t done any lab research on this, just some field shooting yesterday and today, but when I look at images shot at 1600 ISO on the D3, they look like images taken on my D2x at 400 ISO. You just can’t believe what you’re seeing. Bill did a demo for the class last night, and even showed images shot at 6400 ISO and there were literally gasps in the room at the low levels of noise. You’ve gotta understand; this isn’t just an improvement in the noise and detail—this is way beyond that. Without sounding corny (though it still will), this is like a new dawn in the digital camera era, and now I can see where noise will soon be a non-issue. I was fully expecting to be impressed with the D3’s low noise, but I honestly wasn’t prepared for this. I was blown away. We all were.
September 22nd, 2007 at 14:27
Awesome!
Hope the noise is just as low on the D300.
September 22nd, 2007 at 22:22
Not likely. The physics just don’t support it. The photosites on the D3 are close to 9 microns where as the photosites on the D300 are under 6 microns. I expect the D300 to be mildly better than the D200 or D2x. Nikon is claiming the best DX performance yet from the D300. I’d be overjoyed with acceptable ISO 800 images from the D300.